Terminal Nerds II: Electric Boogaloo

First, our home-grown OSXCLI tag on del.icio.us has yielded a wondrous crop of links for the OSX Terminal newbies. Although the reading level does seem to be inching northward, there’s still a ton of great stuff that should help folks at many skill levels.

Also, a followup CLI discussion on the 43F Google Group has provoked some very smart people to talk about how they use their Macs. The most fascinating comes from my new favorite fake nemesis and CLI stud, John S.J. Anderson, who has posted a terrific breakdown of his setup and emacs world that you should not miss:

I’m a sysadmin and the father of a two-year old, which means my life is almost completely interrupt-driven. My system allows me to quickly capture new input as it happens, and then more fully process it later, which is key to me avoiding a complete mental meltdown. [read it all »]

There are many other highlights on the thread itself that I’ve printed out for future reference. Here are a few:

But, I just highly suggest that once you start learning to make the CLI a place you like, that looks the way you want and behaves as you want that you'll find it far less intimidating. Once you've configured your own prompt there's something of a feeling of satisfied conquest. --[restiffbard]

and

One thing you can do to ease the transition [into emacs] is enable some of the traditional Mac keybindings (e.g., Cmd-Q, Cmd-C/Cmd-V) by adding the following to your .emacs file... --[Christopher Elkins]

and, probably my favorite of the bunch, is this excellent introduction to UNIX and the command line, by Tim Conrad:

Probably the most important thing to understand about the way that Unix
works, in general, is that it's a 'tool-based' system. Instead of doing
the Microsoftian design concept, wherein a single tool does everything
under the sun, there are a bunch of small tools that can be hooked
together to do something complex.
--[Tim Conrad]

As you can see by the inset photo, I finally took the plunge last night and picked up Stallman's very large (and surprisingly entertaining) GNU Emacs Manual. I've added this to my current Projects list, and plan to babystep my way through it over the next few months. I'll share how it goes and look forward to more of this stuff from you all. Thanks for all the pointers and do keep 'em coming.

I dunno, John. In the case you mention, emacs is really just serving as another loose piece—it’s just that it happens to be a loose piece that functions to join others together for ad hoc functionality. Since it doesn’t un-loosen anything it touches, it still seems very UNIX-y to my untrained eye.

Don’t even get me started on what happens if someone’s monolithic Entourage database gets even slightly corrupted. :)

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